Heartless Bastards

You may have noticed something of a flummoxing at various media websites over the fact that the Fox News nerve gas apparently wore off sufficiently over the weekend for Chris Wallace to notice that Eric Cantor serves the same function in a democracy as would a Schwinn dealership off Georges Bank. This was considered something of a great gettin'-up morning although, out in the country, the lack of enthusiasm shown by Cantor and the House majority that he leads for the jobs to which they all were elected is evinced in a 1,000 different ways. I continue to maintain that, when the history of this administration is written, its primary flaw is going to be reckoned as having been its assumption that the political opposition was made up of rational men dedicated to the public good. This belief was pretty hilarious to start with, and has only become more laughable the longer we go since the day the country has the audacity to re-elect a (black) president of whom these people, and the shoeless, Bible-bashing mouthbreathers many of them represent, represent.

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(Is that harsh? Tough. We are talking about voters who, by and large, vote against their own economic self-interest time and time again and who, quite honestly, are the biggest suckers in the history of representative democracy. They continue to support policies that render their states into third-world sweatshops for corporations headquartered thousands of miles away. They doom their kids to inadequate schools and themselves to the whims of free-market medicine. The problem, of course, is that the rest of us have to live with the consequences and, it should be noted,pay a fkload of the bills for it besides. You're welcome, idiots.)

Hence, the administration's charmingly child-like notion that the sequester would result in cuts so severe that the representatives from Outer Moochistan would be hearing from outraged constituents. This notion was based on two premises, both of which were based on assumptions belied by the facts that a) the constituents are so full of the undigestible fried crap about "Big Government" fed to them on their radios and on their favorite teevee news network that they're convinced that creating their own misery is the highest expression of, you know, freedom!, and b) that the representatives actually represent these people when, in fact, those representatives are more likely to represent some billionnaire with an open checkbook currently lounging on the veranda in Gstaad. So, most of the complaints about what's going on come from those places in which the president derived his greatest support, which puts the administration in something of a bind. Take, for example, what's going on up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) in the city of Framingham, where they've been studying heart disease since 1948.

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The study will remain open, but the cuts, which are effective Thursday, will force layoffs in November of 19 clinical and administrative workers, as well as the elimination of examinations and lab operations. The FHS, which began in 1948 with 5,209 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts as its subjects, has produced more than 2,850 papers and is credited with coining the term "risk factors" as well as saving or improving the lives of countless people. The cuts are the result of both the automatic federal spending reduction known as the sequester and shifting budget priorities of the NHLBI, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.

The Framingham Heart Study is a landmark. (As you see, it was where the phrase "risk factors" was invented.) Almost everything we know about the causes and prevention of cardiovascular disease, things we all take for granted now, has at least part of its basis in the work done by the study.

Over the years, careful monitoring of the Framingham Study population has led to the identification of the major CVD risk factors - high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, smoking, obesity, diabetes, and physical inactivity - as well as a great deal of valuable information on the effects of related factors such as blood triglyceride and HDL cholesterol levels, age, gender, and psychosocial issues.

Now, because the Republicans in the House Of Representatives simply refuse to help govern the nation -- and because, back a while, some Democrats in the administration thought this was simply theoretical, and not a perfect statement of everything the modern Republican party believes -- a study which has done nothing but good for almost 70 years is going to be hamstrung because the most occluded arteries in America are the ones overseen by the likes of Eric Cantor. What did anyone expect of these people, anyway?

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